Atto Disk Benchmark

One of the finest tools available to measure storage performance is ATTO. I love it to death as it is so reliable and reproduces such accurate results. The great thing about ATTO is that we can test with predefined block sizes. So we can test with a 32 MB sequence of 4KB files, yet also 32 MB in 1MB files. This gives us an excellent scope of overall performance with small and large files.

ATTO Write performance:

The most important task for the SSD is ... writing files. We scale 4KB block sizes towards large 1024KB block sizes in bursts of 32MB and then measure how fast the storage device is dealing with them. The storage units we used:

Samsung SP0802N ATA (80 GB)

Maxtor 6 Y200M0 (200GB)]

WD15 00ADFD0 Raptor (150GB)

OCZ CORE SSD (64GB)

Silicon Power SSD SLC (32GB)

G.Skill SSD (64 GB)

As you can see all SSD drives stumble into their Achilles heel with small file block sizes. For any SSD, small block files are much harder to write fast. But still that's really performance that can be compared to an average 5400 RPM HD.

Once we pass 16KB file sizes ... the Silicon Power SSD starts to rock. Current word is that, for Windows Vista, a patch is in the works to prevent small block-sizes, which would help greatly. For an MLC SSD the write performance is good above the 16K block size, below that it could be better.

We see that the G.Skill drive indeed surpasses the 90 MB/sec write performance and in some instances even touched 100 MB/sec of write performance.

ATTO Read performance:

Once we look at read performance of the tested unit we are a little flabbergasted. Again we see the drive surpass the advertised 155Mb/sec performance threshold and we measure over 165 MB/sec at several points.

Follow the bright green line, we see the SSD to be slower at really small block sizes. But here as well, after 16KB file-sizes .... the performance goes into the stratosphere.

That read performance is twice as fast compared to a 150 GB WD Raptor drive. Mind you that the G.Skill drive is one of the cheaper MLC drives available. Roughly 160 USD. As Paris Hilton likes to say: "That's hot".

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